Customer Effort Score (CES) Calculator | Quantify How Easy Support Was

Enter how many respondents chose each effort level and instantly calculate your Customer Effort Score (CES) for free. Supports both 5-point and 7-point scales, showing the low-effort response rate and average score at a glance.

Tips

CES tells you exactly where to fix your process next — a spike in high-effort responses points straight at a confusing step or an unclear FAQ.
Use a 5-point scale for routine support tracking, and a 7-point scale when you need to detect smaller shifts over time. Pick the one that fits your goal.
Measuring with the same question and scale over time lets you compare the effect of UI changes or process simplification numerically.
Check both the low-effort response rate and the average effort score together — the average helps you see the overall trend without being skewed by a handful of extreme responses.
If CES comes back low (high effort), read the free-text comments to pinpoint exactly which step in the process was causing the friction.

Frequently Asked Questions

It varies by industry, but a low-effort response rate (bottom two levels) of 75% or higher is generally considered excellent, 60-75% good, 40-60% average, and below 40% suggests room for improvement. Because industry averages vary widely, comparing against your own historical scores is usually more practical.

CES measures how much effort a process required, CSAT measures satisfaction with the outcome, and NPS measures longer-term loyalty and willingness to recommend. Since each metric targets something different, they are typically used together or chosen based on what you want to learn.

Using only the single lowest (or highest) level as the cutoff can make the score unstable because the sample size shrinks. Grouping the bottom two levels together (a "Low 2 Box" approach) is the widely used industry convention for a more stable "low effort" measure.

There is no single right answer. A 5-point scale works well for straightforward tracking, while a 7-point scale is better when you need to detect finer-grained changes or want to match the granularity of an existing survey.

Start by reading the free-text comments from respondents who reported high effort, and look for specific causes such as overly complex procedures, unclear instructions, or being passed between departments — that's the first step toward improvement.

Side Note — Why "Reduce Effort" Beats "Delight the Customer"

The Customer Effort Score (CES) was introduced in the 2010 paper "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers," published by CEB (now part of Gartner). The paper argued that the biggest driver of customer loyalty isn't delighting customers — it's reducing the effort they have to put in, challenging the multi-dimensional satisfaction surveys that had dominated the field up to that point.

There are two common question formats. One is an agreement-scale version ("How much do you agree the company made it easy to handle your issue?"), where a higher number means easier. The other, used here, is a direct effort-scale version ("How much effort did you have to put forth?"), often called CES 2.0, where a lower number means easier.

CES matters most at touchpoints where customers are actively trying to resolve a problem, such as support desks and call centers. While CSAT measures satisfaction with the outcome and NPS measures long-term loyalty, CES captures how smooth the experience itself was — which strongly predicts whether a customer will bother contacting the company again. CEB's research found that companies with lower customer effort tend to see higher repeat business.

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Customer Effort Score (CES) Calculator | Quantify How Easy Support Was

Tips

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as a good CES score?

How is CES different from CSAT and NPS?

Why count the bottom two levels as "low effort"?

Should I use a 5-point or 7-point scale?

What should I check if CES comes back low (high effort)?

Side Note — Why "Reduce Effort" Beats "Delight the Customer"